Traditionally, Parking lots in a city are regulated by road transport office of a concerned state or a municipal corporation of the city. But, regulation norms fixed by authority is causing inconvenience to common public at large. By way of example only, the regulation norms say, a user shall park a vehicle at a marked space only. Due to these norms, there is parking space crunch in peak business hours. The authority marks equal space for all the vehicles irrespective of their size. As a result, a smaller sized vehicle may occupy available marked parking space which could have been optimally utilized to accommodate other larger sized vehicle.
Presently, to identify an available free space in the parking lot, different system uses, individual sensors that are placed at each location to monitor status. Video based systems in the parking lots have to be pre-marked or calibrated manually and a decision is achieved based on how much of background is obscured.
However, conventional solutions suffer from a lack of generality and ease of deployment which is the reason why they have not been readily implemented. Also, they leave a lot of scope for error. Any of the sensors used by the conventional solutions may get blocked by a pebble, or the background may change, or some of the vehicles may blend in color of the background making it difficult to differentiate between the background and foreground.
Hence, it would be desirable to have methods and devices to address the above, mentioned drawbacks faced by the conventional solutions.